Last Friday, March 17, 2023, 135 students at Waterloo High School in Waterloo, Illinois did what students all over the country should be doing if or when their administrations decide to permit co-ed restrooms. These students defied the cultural diktats to sexually integrate all spaces in which humans engage in intimate bodily functions or undress—diktats issued by tyrannical, anti-science “trans”-cultists and their collaborators.
The Waterloo High School administration began allowing allow girl students who pretend to be boys to use boys’ restrooms. Students expressed their opposition to this offensive but increasingly common public school practice, following which the administration told students that if they are uncomfortable sharing restrooms with peers of the opposite sex, they should use the single occupancy bathroom in the nurse’s office. That would be one bathroom for potentially the entire student body.
Last Friday, 135 students lined up peacefully to use that one bathroom. Then on Monday night, a huge group of people showed up at a school board meeting, most of whom opposed the co-ed bathroom policy.
Noteworthy in this whole mess is that schools have long suggested that cross-sex impersonating students use the single-occupancy restrooms in nurse’s offices—an option impersonators regularly refuse. And now administrators are insisting normal, rational students with normal, healthy feelings of modesty derived from sex-based differences to use the one bathroom in nurses’ offices.
While “trans”-cultists and their collaborators continue to use costly lawsuits to press their radical goal of eradicating all public recognition of sex differences, laws still allow schools to base locker room and bathroom usage on biological sex:
1. The Illinois Human Rights Act states the following:
Exemption. Nothing in this Article shall apply to. … Facilities Distinctly Private. Any facility, as to discrimination based on sex, which is distinctly private in nature such as restrooms, shower rooms, bath houses, health clubs and other similar facilities for which the Department, in its rules and regulations, may grant exemptions based on bona fide considerations of public policy.
2. The implementing regulation (34 C.F.R. § 106.33) of Title IX of the Education Amendments of 1972 states,
A recipient may provide separate toilet, locker room, and shower facilities on the basis of sex, but such facilities provided for students of one sex shall be comparable to such facilities provided for students of the other sex.
3. Likewise, Title 45 of the Regulations on Public Welfare in the Code of Federal Regulations (§ 618.410) states,
A recipient may provide separate toilet, locker room, and shower facilities on the basis of sex, but such facilities provided for students of one sex shall be comparable to such facilities provided for students of the other sex.
4. Governor J.B. Pritzker—a partisan and bigot in the battle to rob humans of their sex-based rights—issued “guidance” created by his handpicked partisan and bigoted task force that recommends allowing boys and girls to use the private spaces of opposite-sex peers. School officials are now using his legally non-binding guidance as if it’s law.
5. Finally, a recently decided case from the Eleventh Circuit Court of Appeals, Adams v. School Board of St. Johns County, proves that the bathroom issue is far from settled. Robbins Schwartz, an Illinois law firm specializing in education law, reported on the decision filed on Dec. 30, 2022:
In a 7-4 decision, the Eleventh Circuit held that the District’s policy of separating access to communal restrooms by biological sex and, as an alternative, providing single-stall, sex-neutral restrooms for use by transgender students, did not violate Title IX or the Equal Protection Clause.
Neither inclusivity, fairness, equality, equity, diversity, compassion, open-mindedness, dignity, nor respect requires humans to ignore the objective, immutable sex of others. None of these requires humans to treat objective, immutable sex as if it has no meaning. None of these requires boys or girls to share restrooms, changing areas, or showers with persons of the opposite sex. None of these requires Americans to make restrooms, changing areas, and locker rooms co-ed. None of these requires Americans to accept the view that restrooms should correspond to the feelings of people about their sex rather than their sex.
Equality demands that we treat like things alike. It does not require us to treat unlike things as if they are alike. Boys and girls are substantively different as even gender-dysphoric persons (and homosexuals) acknowledge.
Since leftists, including leftists in Waterloo, claim the unwillingness of boys to share restrooms with gender-dysphoric girls is evidence of fear, disrespect, misunderstanding, closemindedness, unfairness, and lack of compassion, how would they characterize the unwillingness of gender-dysphoric girls to share restrooms with normal girls?
Before radically altering bathroom and locker room usage policies, school administrations and boards need to have a full and fair discussion of the following issues with the communities they serve:
If sex and “gender” are two wholly different and unrelated things, with sex being an immutable objective phenomenon and “gender” being a subjective, internal, and sometimes fluid phenomenon, why should restrooms and locker room usage correspond to “gender identity” as opposed to biological sex?
Why is it legitimate for boys to oppose sharing restrooms with female peers who accept their sex (what the left calls “cisgender” girls) but not legitimate for boys to oppose sharing
restrooms with female peers who reject their sex? Why should a girl’s subjective feelings about her sex affect boys’ feelings or beliefs about going to the bathroom in front of or near them?
Why should gender-dysphoric girls be able to use restrooms with only biological boys, but biological boys are prohibited from using restrooms with only biological boys?
Is it unnatural or pathological for girls or boys to object to engaging in excretory functions in a stall next to an unrelated person of the opposite sex doing likewise? If not, should schools respect and honor those feelings through policy that prohibits co-ed restrooms?
The unpalatable irony in all this is that “trans” activists and their collaborators argue that opposition to co-ed restrooms and locker rooms is “divisive,” while implying that the sexual integration of these heretofore private spaces is not divisive. “Divisive” is just one more in the long list of epithets hurled at conservatives to force their silence and submission.
Meanwhile, adults are forcing minors to do what they—the adults—would not want to do. Someone should ask Superintendent Brian Charron if he would like to share a restroom or locker room with Principal Lori Costello. How would he like to engage in bodily functions with Costello in the next stall. How would he like to be standing at a urinal and have Costello walk past him. Enquiring minds want to know.
